


un-alone

by freloux



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Hand Jobs, Intellectual stimulation, Masturbation, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 22:05:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6026938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freloux/pseuds/freloux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe they're both greedy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	un-alone

Clara's life has become so much bigger, richer, and more interesting with him. He's intrigued by _everything_. Art, films, tv, useless bits of trivia. Technology. The history of her world. The times they don't spend running together are spent in desultory conversations about learning, knowledge. Physical reality. He'll bring her up to speed - to a point - before rushing on ahead, too impatient to wait for her to catch up.

The intensity of the conversations turns her on a bit. They'll be talking and she'll feel it between her legs as she leans forward to hear him better. The vigour with which he approaches life makes everything he does oddly sexy. Talking with his hands. Listening contemplatively while she answers whatever it was he threw at her.

They're talking and Clara reaches out. She doesn't know why, really, it's just because she wants to. She runs her hands through his hair and he swallows, asks her what she's doing. Clara hums in response, continuing her idle movements. Watching as his hair sticks up in random patterns. "I'm bored," she explains eventually. "Why? I just showed you that chirping star. It's going to be a tourist attraction in a few thousand years," he protests.

Yes, but. She wants to see more. What more, she's not sure yet. So he lets her touch him. A new foreign landscape for her to land on. She's still humming softly as she steps close, then closer. Measuring him. Slow gyres, whorls, loops over his body. Up close like this, she can see all his lines and valleys. The texture of his skin rough under her hands. Tracks in his hair from when her fingers traced through it.

(Clara gets bored a lot.)

It becomes natural extension of their conversations about life, the universe, and everything. He's like a biology textbook. Neat little diagrams, that goes there. One head, two hearts. He's perfectly willing to lie there and let her listen. The hum of his ship, the hum of his hearts. She's fallen asleep like that more than once, hearing the comforting reverb: one beat hesitant, the other steady and sure. His t-shirt pushed up to reveal a path of coarse silver-black hair. If she goes too far down it, he skitters away like a bug under a microscope.

He always reacts in an odd way when she touches his neck. Stroking the skin, seeking out his pulse. He - shrinks, is what he does. She can hear his heartbeats start to go unsteady and then pound faster.

***

Clara's good at thinking. It's a little strange to think of the Doctor in a sexual way: this person who she spends so much time talking to, but about whom she still knows so little.

And yet. It's a body feeling: just something wandering around hungry, needing to be fed. The Doctor, tracing his fingers along cables, wires. Loops that carry electricity. Eventually pushing his fingers slowly, oh so slowly, into the soft and yielding material of the telepathic circuits. His voice, warm and pooling.

She lies there in the thrumming aftershocks and feels greedy.

Maybe they're both greedy.

***

He suggests that they go to the Olympic Park in London. She's surprised because it's so mundane to her. "You don't have to leave the atmosphere for adventure," he says, completely serious. "You can be a tourist in your own backyard." Clara smirks at him. What a dork.

Off-duty construction workers playing rugby. Mums with prams, screaming kids. Pinwheels spinning lazily in the breeze. It's a warm afternoon, so he takes off his coat, hooks it over one elbow, and offers her the other. "My lady?" He's always so formal. Stiff. Observing. This tension he carries like some weird, horrible shield.

Back in the TARDIS, they wander through endless rooms, corridors and corners and eventually settle themselves into a loveseat in the library. It's a little too small for the both of them. There's an artificial window behind them, permanently set to sunny. Clara presses herself against him. A hug and yet more than a hug. He keeps absolutely still as she touches him. He usually does, during her exploring. She holds him close, breathing in. He smells clean, cold. Distant somehow, like the night sky, yet countered by a hint of something earthier. Coffee, perhaps.

Clara notices how he's made up of angles and sharp lines. Lines that are starting to blur, ever so slightly, as she continues. Her hand over his chest, so narrow it can barely contain the pace of his heartbeats as they slowly pick up. One setting the beat, the other delicately feeding it back.

His coat has gone back to sheltering him, its lining the only bright marks of colour against an otherwise muted expanse. She slips it off. A test. So far, so good. On his lap. Adjusting her weight on his bony thighs. The pinprick detailing on his boots a kind of constellation below her. Button by button, far beyond their rambling conversations. Careful strokes. His hands claw at her back.

Clara touches his lips - how thin under her fingertips. His breath is sugary-sweet from the ice creams they had near the Park. She kisses him then. Accidental and not accidental. Let him take this as far as he wants. He kisses her back. Lips overlapping, a brief moment with tongue that makes her shiver. She can feel him responding and wants to do something about it, wants to let him know he's not alone. Her crotch pounds. (She has two heartbeats, too.) The hard seam of her jeans drags slowly against her as she adjusts on his thigh.

Her hand hand curves over his upper thigh close to him. Not seeking but waiting. The shape of his cock, thick beneath his trousers. That pattern of hair - a path that leads farther than she has ever gone with him, than he has ever allowed her to go. This time he doesn't stop her.

Zipper, trousers, pants. A parabola, curving towards its inevitable end. He braces himself back on his hands. She wants to kiss him, get her mouth on him, but understands that this may well be overwhelming enough. "Is it ok if I keep going?" Clara asks. Small nod. He's a living warmth under her hands, nearly a pulsing, and she aches in sympathy. Lets her touch linger there, slowly drawing up then falling back until he groans. She holds him steady, even though he's wavering in her hand. He's moaning - it's barely recognizable as her name. He twitches in her palm, straining toward a connection that he won't admit he needs.

***

Afterwards she can't see him without remembering. Snapshots. Their lips meeting in that not-quite kiss, lips barely parted, mostly just sharing the other's breath. Eyes wide open, blue into brown. Something settles warm and low in her belly every time she looks at him, knowing that it's there and that she can make him. Has made him. Could again, if he'd let her. But now it seems he won't.

She's very good at thinking. And it's all she can think about. They're running - towards or away, it never seems to matter. In a jungle, in search of something that doesn't seem that important. Sweat dripping. He's telling her something, six feet tall and curving towards her. Snapshot: _curving up in her hand_.

Clara feels his absence and the way he is newly withdrawn from her. He has become so much a part of her. A second skin. They've told each other secrets, shared their lives until it became automatic. She wants to keep being in the same room as him and sensing him like heat. Something has happened and the only way to make sense of it is to know that he feels it, too.

The Doctor is her best friend. If there's one thing she's learned over these past few weeks - months? who keeps track of time anymore, honestly - it's that she can tell him anything, talk to him about anything. She's become used to his systems, his habits, his instincts, his pathologies. His quiet sophistication.

He's bent over some sort of keyboard and doesn't look up when she approaches him. When she asks why they've stopped this, he shuts down like the computer he was trying to reboot. They talk about so many things, she hadn't quite realised that there were things that were Off Limits. They just Didn't Discuss them, so it hadn't occurred to her to pry.

"I can't. It's - it's different for me. And I know how - how this is important to you. Apparently." He clears his throat, goes back to the computer. "Perhaps we can stop by a shop next time we're on Earth and you can. Er. Get one of those things. To help."

He waves his hand and Clara figures she's never blushed so hard in her life.

***

Clara finds him in the library again, perusing some obscure theory an acquaintance wrote just for him. It always comes back to the library, doesn't it? Where some of their most revealing conversations have happened. Where the answers to everything - almost everything - are within easy reach. He's sitting on that same loveseat, and Clara feels that eager drop low in her stomach. Remembering. He's nestled between the shelves, under the "window." Lost in thought but still lonely. She realises that he's always lonely, even when he's with her.

Clara sits next to him, touches him the way she usually does when she starts this. Except this time he takes her hand and, gentle but firm, sets it back in her lap. "Please don't, Clara." He returns to the book even though he's very obviously not reading.

"No, _you_ don't," she responds. The conversation veers perilously close to emotional, but Clara continues. She's always been brave. "I want to know. What it's like for you. Would you share that with me? Please, Doctor - you've already shared so much - just...share this, too?" An eternity ticks past. Then another.

And finally he nods. He stands in front of her the same way he does when he's about to tell her they have to run. Except neither of them are running now.

Undressing. Just another kind of touch: the feel of his different fabrics. Soft cotton, smooth velvet.

Her own clothes off, piece by piece, like she's a paper doll. It's his turn to touch, to explore, to learn, but it seems that the task is too much for him. So she offers her hand and he accepts it, evidently soothed by the familiarity of the gesture. They lie down together on the library floor. Clara looks up at him above her as he pushes inside her. She reaches up, into his hair - she's always liked touching his hair. Some kind of indication of his humanity amongst his alien facade. Nubby carpet at her back. Mahogany bookshelves all around them, heavy with ideas. The artificial window and its constant stream of sunlight: beamy bars over flexing skin. Details that cease to matter, the longer they go. His clean, cold scent has changed: it's morphed into something warmer and less distant. As though he's no longer the night sky, but the sunrise.

"Oh!" Clara exclaims: both anticipatory as she feels it starting, and surprise at how different it is from what she was expecting. She's not sure _what_ she was expecting, exactly, but it certainly wasn't anything like this. A high, sharp point of pleasure and all these colours exploding inside her head: silver-grey, ruddy orange, purpled maroon. She's made aware that these are _her_ colours. That he sees her, has always seen her, and this is how she appears to him whenever he thinks about her.

Colours melting all around them, both within and outside her. Colours that dance along her skin. He draws his fingertips over her like he's painting her in hesitant brushstrokes. "Please - I need - " Clara says quietly.

She steadies her hand against his chest as she gets herself into position and feels his heartbeats begin to change. They sound the way they do when she touches his neck. A shift from slow and tremulous to faster and more percussive. Clara moves on him cautiously, watching his face. His expression between bliss and fear. He doesn't touch her, as if scared she's going to break.

If she's going to break, then she wants to break with him. Because of him.

So she moves herself faster on him, feeling him shiny-slick inside her. He gasps her name - a litany - and new colours begin to appear. His colours. Sea green, scarlet, and, inexplicably, peach. All of them unfurling in her mind, matching the way he's releasing inside her. She reaches it again, seeing her colours once more in blooming vividness alongside his as she contracts around him.

All that running, all the attempts to do this her way, never made sense. Clara finally understands why. She had to see with his eyes first.


End file.
